Abrams to surprise ‘Star Wars’ fans in next installment by killing off franchise

Saying that he wants to offer fans a truly shocking turn of events in the next “Star Wars” installment, director J.J. Abrams has announced that at the end of “Episode VII: The Force Awakens,” he’s going to kill off the newly reanimated franchise. He cautions, however, that the task will not be easy.

“Killing off a franchise is tough as hell,” Abrams told the Dandy Goat. “I mean, we all thought ‘Star Wars’ was dead after ‘Return of the Jedi’ in 1983, and again with ‘Revenge of the Sith’ in 2005, but we learned how wrong we were after Disney got the rights in 2012 and brought me on board soon afterwards.”

The problem, according to Abrams — who has been criticized for being unable to bring the rebooted “Star Trek” franchise to a timely demise — is that by clever use of narrative devices, even a second-rate team of writers can bring any story and characters back to life, much as in soap operas when a character who supposedly died shows up all disheveled and reveals that his death was a farce. Abrams is therefore taking every possible measures to ensure that the franchise will remain permanently, irrecoverably dead after “Episode VII.”

“I don’t want to give everything away,” he said, “but I’ll let you in on a secret. Princess Leia turns into a radical feminist and gets her tubes tied to make certain that no little woman-hating Jedi knights ever try to grow inside her womb. Oh, and as for the lovable Ewoks, they’re all wiped out after a fur-eating bacteria ravages their home moon of Endor. And I might as well tell you that Chewbacca and the other Wookiees go extinct due to rampant inbreeding that causes their offspring to have terrible physical defects.”

One assistant producer, who asked not to be named, said that at the end of the movie, after the midi-chlorians attack the Jedi and render them all schizophrenic, the Dark Side actually wins by building a new Death Star that destroys the entire fabric of space-time in the “Star Wars” universe, leading to the sort of black hole in which all matter is compressed into pure energy, and the mere possibility of thought is negated.

“There will be no going back, narratively speaking,” the producer said. “Never, ever.”

Sources have confirmed that just to be sure that Rian Johnson — who had originally been signed on to direct “Episode VIII” — doesn’t get anywhere near the project, after the release of “Episode VII” Abrams and his team are going to destroy all of the sets, props and costumes in a massive bonfire. Abrams will see to it that the rights to the franchise are collectively acquired by the estimated 2.5 million members of the Roma community — otherwise known as “Gypsies” — who are scattered around Europe and the rest of the world, most of whom are illiterate, lack birth certificates and the legal standing to sign documents, and who are deeply suspicious of outsiders.